Biggest Disappointment: AMD Phenom Processors

It was all smiles at Intel this year, but the engineers over at AMD were working overtime and not smiling. AMD was trying to get Phenom processors out the door as quickly as possible, but it just couldn’t happen soon enough. Legit Reviews first saw Phenom (then called Agena) during the Radeon HD 2xxx ‘World Launch Tour’ on April 23rd in Tunis, Tunisia. Agena was the desktop version of the ‘Barcelona’ Opteron quad-core processor and was scheduled to be launched sometime after Barcelona, which was still on track for a mid-2007 introduction. Legit Reviews did a look back at the AMD Athlon processor series in August and was ready for the Phenom processor series to arrive. Then on Novemeber 19th, 2007 AMD released Phenom processors along with their Spider Platform. AMD was originally going to launch three Phenom processors, but just days before the launch they held back two of the processors and released the following statement.

AMD has decided to launch our AMD Phenom 9700 (2.4GHz) quad core product in Q1 2008, along with our AMD Phenom 9900 (2.6 GHz) quad core processor. The launch of these two higher performance processors models will coincide with the introduction of related, significant performance enhancements in the platform; namely CrossFireX and our new enthusiast graphics product. Higher performance AMD Phenom processors will follow the introduction of the AMD Phenom 9700 and 9900 models, with a 3.0 GHz model in Q2 2008. AMD has a great history of delivering faster parts through a product’s lifecycle, and we are confident that this will remain true.